Titus Andronicus

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So-called. Peacham drawing .

Titus Andronicus ( Early Modern English The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus ) is a drama by William Shakespeare . The play takes place in the late period of the Roman Empire and is about the fate of the Roman general Titus, who gets caught in a bloody cycle of violence and revenge for the Gothic queen Tamora.

The work was probably written in 1591/92 and first appeared in print in 1594. The earliest documented performance dates from January 1594. It is considered a typical revenge tragedy and was extremely popular with English audiences and partly on the European continent until the mid-17th century, but was then performed increasingly rarely.

Shakespeare's authorship was first challenged by Edward Ravenscroft in 1678 . This skeptical attitude grew until the early 20th century. However, there is a growing belief among scholars that the drama could be a joint work by Shakespeare and George Peele . More recently, interest in and fascination with the figure of Titus has increased. Several literary adaptations, modern productions and an elaborate film adaptation were made.

Overview

Storylines

After a victorious campaign against the Goths, Titus returns to Rome. He leads the Gothic queen Tamora and her sons as prisoners. According to an old custom, he sacrifices Alarbus, Tamora's eldest son, on the occasion of the funeral of his own sons who died in the war. When the newly crowned emperor Saturninus takes the Gothic queen as his wife, she seizes her chance to take revenge on Titus. Their sons Chiron and Demetrius rob Titus' daughter Lavinia and brutally abuse her. To avoid being betrayed, the brothers cut off their victim's hands and tongue. Lavinia still manages to reveal the perpetrators. Titus decides to take revenge as well. He kills the brothers and prepares a pie from their corpses, which he presents to the ruling couple at a festival. Only Titus' son Lucius survived the following slaughter, who was chosen as the new emperor.

main characters

There is no list of people in the early print editions. The first list of names comes from Ravenscroft, who published his own adaptation of the work in 1687.

  • Saturninus is the older son of the recently deceased Roman emperor. He competes for the throne with his brother Bassianus.
  • Titus Andronicus is the military leader against the Goths.
  • Titus' brother is called Marcus Andronicus.
  • Lucius, Quintus, Martius and Mutius are the sons of Titus, Lavinia his daughter.
  • Tamora is the queen of the Goths.
  • Alarbus, Chiron and Demetrius are the sons of Tamora.
  • The Moor Aaron is Tamora's lover.

Place and time of the action

The play takes place in late ancient Rome as well as in an army camp of the Goths, around the time of the fourth century.

action

"Aaron protects his son". Ira Aldridge as Aaron, daguerreotype by William Paine of Islington, ca.1852.

The Roman general Titus Andronicus returns victorious from the war against the Goths and, according to Roman custom, has the eldest son of the captured Gothic queen Tamora cut up and burned as a "sacrifice for the slain brothers". Tamora begs in vain for grace, mercy and an end to barbaric customs .

In Rome, after the death of the emperor, the dispute over the succession to the imperial throne broke out. The tribune Marcus Andronicus proclaims that the Roman people have elected Titus to the throne. But he recognizes the imperial crown to the older son of the emperor Saturninus and wants to give him his daughter Lavinia as his wife. But since she is already engaged to the younger emperor's son Bassianus, Saturninus makes the Gothic queen Empress of Rome. Tamora now sees the possibility of revenge on Titus for the death of her eldest son. With the help of her lover, the Moor's Aaron, she sees to it that her two sons, Demetrius and Chiron, stab Bassianus; the blame for this is put on two sons of Titus, Martius and Quintus, who are led away. Aaron incites Demetrius and Chiron's horniness, and Lavinia is raped by them. So that she cannot betray the perpetrators, her tongue is stuck out , as Philomele once did, and her hands cut off , more cunningly than Tereus did. Titus' son Lucius tries in vain to free his brothers Quintus and Martius and is banished. Aaron is crazy about the next intrigue: The two would be spared if Titus cut off a hand; but after Titus has sacrificed his hand, the heads of his two sons are brought to him.

The mutilated Lavinia succeeds in opening the "sad story of Philomeles" in Ovid's Metamorphoses , and with Marcus' help she writes the names of her abusers in the sand with a stick held in her mouth. Titus then kills Tamora's sons, grinds their bones and - “even worse than Procne, I avenge myself” - they serve Tamora, Saturninus and Lucius as food at a “reconciliation dinner” that was called because Lucius is now leading an army of Goths against Rome. Titus, who cannot bear the shame of his violated daughter, stabs her and explains that Demetrius and Chiron were her rapists. When Saturninus wants to get the two of them, Titus announces that they are already there: in the pie that Tamora has already eaten from. Titus stabs Tamora and is stabbed by Saturninus himself, who in turn is killed by Lucius. Aaron is buried alive. Eventually Lucius is crowned Emperor of Rome.

Authorship

Title page of the first quarto 1 by Titus Andronicus

Of the three quarto prints 1594, 1600 and 1611 not a single one names the author, which was in line with the practice at the time. However, the editors of the first folio edition of 1623 John Heminges and Henry Condell incorporated the revenge tragedy into Shakespeare's work without hesitation. Previously, Francis Meres had already referred to Titus as Shakespeare's tragedy in his Palladis Tamia 1598 .

In the long history of literary criticism, the obvious weaknesses in language and design led to strong doubts about Shakespeare's authorship. The centuries-old list includes names such as Edward Ravenscroft, Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, Edmond Malone, William Guthrie, John Upton, Benjamin Heath, Richard Farmer, John Pinkerton and John Monck Mason, followed by William Hazlitt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 19th century. Above all, the barbaric events in the play were considered evidence of a different authorship than Shakespeare's. In his introduction to Reliques of Ancient English Poetry , Thomas Percy wrote in 1794 that the memory of Shakespeare was able to prevail completely against the accusation of having written the play by the best critics.

However, there were significant dissenting voices in the 18th and 19th centuries, mainly from academia. Edward Capell recognized the play's weaknesses in 1768, but still considered Shakespeare to be the author. Charles Knight did the same in 1843, and a few years later prominent German Shakespeare supporters followed, namely AW Schlegel and Hermann Ulrici.

The 20th century was more interested in collaboration. In 1905 John Mackinnon Robertson came to believe that much of it had been written by George Peele and that Robert Greene or Kyd and Marlowe had also contributed to it. TM Parrott named Acts 1, 2.1 and 4.1 as text parts of Peeles in 1919, and Philip Timberlake confirmed Parrott's findings by examining the female endings of the blank verse. However, EK Chambers then discovered methodological errors in Robertson's writing, and Arthur M. Sampley used Parrott's method in 1933 to take a stand against Peele as a co-author. Also Hereward Thimbleby Price was in 1943 call for the sole authorship of Shakespeare. Since J. Dover Wilson's 1948 publication of Titus Andronicus , the assumption that Peele was involved in its drafting has gained space. RF Hill examined the rhetorical means of the play (1957), Macdonald Jackson resorted to rare words (1979), and Marina Tarlinskaja analyzed accents in the iambic pentameters. In 1996 Jackson expanded his approach to include the metric analysis of the functional words and and with . Like Brian Vickers, who carried out analyzes of polysyllabic words, the distribution of alliterations and vocatives in 2002, he awarded Acts 1, 2.1 and 4.1 to George Peele.

reception

Titus Andronicus was considered the "black sheep" among Shakespeare's plays, and TS Eliot called it "one of the stupidest plays ever written". The more recent literary studies, however, come to a more differentiated assessment and already recognize compositional principles in the piece that are characteristic of later Shakespeare's dramas. There are numerous thematic parallels with other Shakespeare plays - such as Hamlet or King Lear  - as well as typical Shakespeare techniques that can also be found in other dramas, such as the use of literary sources. Three adaptations of Titus Andronicus are of particular interest for the German-speaking world : Dürrenmatt's comedy based on Shakespeare of the same title, Heiner Müller's Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome A Commentary on Shakespeare and Botho Strauss ' The Desecration . There is also the retelling of Urs Widmer's play in Shakespeare's Stories Volume II.

filming

The director Julie Taymor filmed the material in 1999 with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange under the name Titus , whereby she stuck to the template relatively closely.

Text output

English

  • Jonathan Bate (Ed.): William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. [1995], reprinted by Thomas Nelson and Sons, Walton-on-Thames 1998
  • Alan Huges (Ed.): William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006, ISBN 978-0-521-67382-2
  • Eugene M. Waith (Ed.): William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1984.
  • John Dover Wilson (Ed.): William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1948.

German

  • Markus Marti (ed.): William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus. English-German study edition. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-86057-568-0 .
  • Frank Günther (Ed.): William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. Bilingual edition. dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-423-12757-0

Other literature

Web links

Commons : Titus Andronicus  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus  - Sources and full texts (English)

supporting documents

  1. ^ Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare-Handbuch. Time, man, work, posterity. 5th, revised and supplemented edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 , p. 486.
  2. ↑ Herodian reports in his work De imperatorum romanorum praeclare gestis of the brothers Caracalla (whose birth name was Bassianus) and Publius Septimius Geta , sons of the emperor Septimius Severus . A soldier named Saturninus appears in the story as a traitor. Nicholas Smyth translated the work into English in 1550 under the title The History of Herodian . See Markus Marti (Ed.): William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. English-German study edition. Stauffenberg Verlag, Tübingen 2008, p. 37.
  3. ↑ Two Western Roman emperors were named Titus, namely Titus Flavius ​​Vespasianus and Titus Antoninus , who, like the figure in the play, was nicknamed Pius. The Eastern Roman emperor Andronikos I Komnenos was known for his cruelty. See Markus Marti (Ed.): William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. English-German study edition. Stauffenberg Verlag, Tübingen 2008, pp. 70–73.
  4. ↑ It is presented as the Tribune of the People , but this office no longer existed in the German Empire.
  5. ↑ Lucius was the name of the son of Antoninus Pius. He was together with Marc Aurel Kaiser. Gaius Mucius Scaevola put his right hand into the fire to prove his bravery. Lavinia is the name of Aeneas' wife .
  6. ↑ Tomyris is the name of a queen of the Scythians who took cruel vengeance on Cyrus for the murder of her sons . She was counted among the Nine Heroines .
  7. ↑ The wise Centaur Chiron is alluded to in the last act of the drama.
  8. ↑ In Marlowe's The Jew of Malta , Ithamar is the evil slave of Barabas. This is the name of the son of the biblical Aaron.
  9. ^ Translated and cited from: Eugene M. Waith (Ed.): Titus Andronicus The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1984, p. 12.
  10. ↑ See Vicker's summary of Shakespeare's pros and cons (2002: 150–156).
  11. ^ JM Robertson: Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus ?: A Study in Elizabethan Literature. Watts, London 1905, p. 479.
  12. ↑ TM Parrott: Shakespeare's Revision of Titus Andronicus. In: Modern Language Review, 14 (1919), pp. 21-27.
  13. ↑ Philip Timberlake: The Feminine Ending in English Blank Verse: A Study of its Use by Early Writers in the Measure and its Development in the Drama up to the Year 1595 Banta, Wisconsin 1931, pp. 114–119.
  14. ^ Brian Vickers: Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002, p. 137.
  15. ↑ Hereward Price: The Authorship of Titus Andronicus. In: Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42: 1 (Spring 1943), pp. 55-65.
  16. ↑ John Dover Wilson (Ed.): Titus Andronicus. The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1948, pp. Xxxvi-xxxvii.
  17. ↑ Brian Vickers: Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002, pp. 219-239.
  18. ↑ Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare-Handbuch , Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, p. 493 ff.